So I Left Squarespace

Squarespace emailed me yesterday. My annual bill is going from $297 to $348. A 17% raise, same site I already had, no new anything. Just a bigger number.

I didn’t argue. I cancelled.

Honestly, I’d been eyeing the door for a while, and the email just gave me a reason to stop stalling. So I spent the week rebuilding puhala.com from scratch. It now runs as a static site I put together with an AI coding agent, hosted on Cloudflare.

Here’s the part that still makes me grin. That rebuild doesn’t cost me $348 a year. It costs me about twelve bucks, and most of that is the domain name. The hosting is free. Not free-trial free, not free-until-they-hook-you free. Actually free, for what a site like mine needs.

And I didn’t downgrade to save the money. I upgraded. The photography section is better than anything I could have built by dragging boxes around a template. Every photo is a print you can flip over to read how it was made: camera, settings, the whole story on the back. I own every pixel now. Nobody’s template, nobody’s rules, nobody’s roadmap but mine.

Why did Squarespace raise the price? I don’t know, and I’m not going to pretend I do. My best guess is boring: they got bought out in a big private-equity deal a couple of years ago, and companies that go through that tend to lean on prices to pay down the debt. That’s a spreadsheet decision, not a me decision.

But here’s what I do know, because I just lived it. The thing a CMS sells you is that it does the hard part so you don’t have to. You never touch code. You never learn how any of it works. For a long time that was worth real money, and for plenty of people it still is.

For me, that math quietly flipped. An AI agent plus a place to park the files now does the hard part. Not perfectly, not effortlessly, but well enough that paying to rent the old convenience stopped making sense. The price hike didn’t cause that. It just made me finally notice.

Let’s talk about the trade, though, because these posts usually skip it. I’m not telling you the CMS is dead. If your website is a tool for your business and not a weekend hobby, Squarespace is probably still the right call. You get support. You’re not the one up at midnight when something breaks. You get to spend your attention on your actual work instead of a build pipeline. That’s a real deal, and a fair one.

What changed is who the exception is. It used to be developers who rolled their own. Now it’s anyone willing to sit down with one of these agents and stay a little curious. That’s a much bigger group than it was a year ago, and it grows every month. I just happen to be one of them who got a price-hike email on the right week.

So that’s the story. I got a little annoyed, rolled up my sleeves, and walked away from a bill I’d been paying mostly out of habit. The site’s faster, it’s mine, and it runs for less than I’d spend on coffee in a week.

Pull up a chair. Everything’s still here. It just lives in a house I built myself now.